Jews anguish over German question

By David Minthorn
Associated Press

The question still roils the Jewish community: Is reconciliation with Germany possible or even desirable after the slaughter of 6 million?

Some believe relations were poisoned forever by the Nazi's campaign to wipe out Europe's Jews. To them, "Never forget" means refusing to buy German products, travel to Germany or having anything to do with Germans.

But more than five decades after the war, political realities are challenging unbending attitudes. Modern Germany bears no resemblance to Hitler's era, the government has made restitution to many victims, and Germany has become a stalwart ally of Israel, as well as the United States.

Harriet Mandel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, a coordinating body for 60 groups, favors reconciliation, but other Jews in the United States do not.

"Sentiment to continue boycotting Germany is quite deeply imbedded," Mandel said. "Second- and third-generation American-born Jews are the most reluctant to move on."

An estimated 250,000 children of Holocaust survivors live in the United States, researchers say, some banding together to discuss childhoods colored by their parents' efforts to deal psychologically with the death camps, losses of family members and guilt about their own survival.

Even American Jews not directly touched by the Holocaust say they are expressing a tribal solidarity with the victims and their offspring by refusing to buy German or visit the country.

The Jewish population in Germany now numbers more than 100,000, the largest community in Western Europe, with most coming from Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe over the last 10 years. It is a remarkable rebirth, considering Germany's prewar Jewish population of 500,000 was almost wiped out.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, a German-Jewish Holocaust refugee, believes Jewish sentiment for shunning Germany has declined over the last 20 years as German democracy has strengthened.

"The German generation in power today is trying very hard to make amends," said Blumenthal, who heads the new national Jewish Museum in Berlin. "They recognize that the worst thing that could happen is to forget."

Still, he said survivors' views on Germany are influenced less by political developments than by whether close family members were victims of the Nazis.

Meanwhile, Inge Oppenheimer, who spent her childhood in the German city of Kassel and was deported to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, says that, "Today Germans are different. I must admit it."

And Roman Weingarten, originally from Krakow, Poland, and a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp, says, "Today, to put them (Germans) all in one bushel, I don't associate with that."